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This is not the first St Patrick’s Day, indulging in every vice applied to his countrymen, that Francis feels close to drinking himself past Irishness. He is further than ever from his father, whose face slips from the edges of his own as the muffled bells progress somewhere over his head; he is paring himself down to utmost essential. Ritual – though this is one, for all it’s not an exception to the rule – feels as far off as the fucking equator.
The thought strikes him deep enough to develop an absurd hallucination: a Netsilik people’s line-crossing ceremony, Neptune terrible in furs.
Un-Irished at the top of the world, Francis Crozier opens himself another bottle.
***
They’d had something like a line-crossing in March six years prior, a few weeks after they’d pointed their arses south and fled for that which the Navy termed civilisation.
James Ross, bless and damn him, had insisted they make something of their retreat to Tasmania. They had no business invoking a sea god without the equator so James turned to the next best thing on the calendar and announced a pantomime for the two ships, dressing himself as St Patrick to the delight of the men and, Francis reckoned looking back, to get a rise from him.
‘I always fancied myself a bit Papish,’ James mused, peering himself in the little glass in Erebus’ great cabin. They had blue water ahead and were making good time, with the ships due to come back alongside one another for the evening’s festivities. ‘Your people aren’t, are they, Frank?’
‘You know they aren’t.’
‘I did know that,’ he drawled, sliding a hand down to his hip to draw the dyed-green sailcloth cassock in coquettish and tight and turning slightly to examine his slightly blasphemous reflection. ‘Otherwise I wouldn’t be hearing the end of it from you, would I. Gie’s a hand, will you?’
Like most born-officers, he’d never bothered learning how to sew – it was a topic that’d become a sticking point, sometimes playful, sometimes not, over the winter along the Great Icy Barrier. Francis grumbled and rose from his chair with a big huff to flatten the makeshift gold brocade down James’ side, taking the proffered needle handed over his shoulder and adjusting the loose fabric into something resembling a trim.
James tilted his head, examining himself thoughtfully. Francis tended to avoid the glass with the Antarctic still hanging so close; he kept catching sight of himself unexpectedly, reflected in the compass or the back of a dinner spoon, and the sharp recede to his sandy hairline and winter hollow in his cheeks made him more tired than he could afford. Erebus’ captain and their commander, by contrast, had kept himself damned young in the cold – relentless, like he was being today. Sometimes his cheerfulness felt like a calculated effort for the men, and Francis resented him absurdly for the effort he put in, but then he’d see James’ broad, whiskered face turn quiet with awe over a berg or the stars and he’d forgive him again and again.
The needle was too big and punched large, childish holes in the sailcloth. Francis shifted on his aching knees – not the normal state of things between them – and licked the thread straight whilst he felt James ruminating above him. Here we go.
‘You don’t want to go back, do you.’
‘To the Antarctic?’ Francis scoffed and shuffled closer, tugging St Patrick’s gown straight. ‘Bit late for that, isn’t it.’
‘We could transport you, if you fancied desertion. Botany Bay with the rest of your countrymen – I’m sure you’d feel right at home.’
‘Ah Jesus, James.’
‘I’m only joking.’ He looked down and was briefly brown-eyed and sorrowful the way other English people got right after they made something awkward; Francis shook his head impatiently and kept his eyes on his stitches. ‘No – I meant go back to Ireland. You wouldn’t even if they gave you the joy of putting you out to pasture after all this, would you.’
To tell the truth, he’d truly not thought of it for a long time, and at his age that forgetting made him feel a peculiar kind of guilt that had more to do with the place than the people. Francis doubted that James knew he’d grown up an easy half day’s ride from Downpatrick, where St Patrick was said to be buried, or that many of the boys he’d grown up with had gone on pilgrimage there and come back smug and otherworldly enough times that Francis had begged his own father to take him and been whipped for his unintended blasphemy.
And yet James was, of course, right – by this point in time he knew Francis exactly. They had one another’s measure more precisely than magnetic fields or a badly-rigged topsail, and as a consequence in this cabin and Terror’s James never gave a thought to saying exactly what he felt the moment it arrived. Francis briefly considered lying or pretending his mouth was too full of a tailor’s pins to give a proper answer, only they didn’t have any and James’ hand was light and inquisitive in his hair, stopping his own thoughts right up.
‘You,’ Francis said after a moment, tipping his own chin up and glaring, ‘are a bald-faced liar if you’ve made plans of your own beyond Tasmania on our second return. So don’t you go making me out to be some kind of national martyr for keeping myself in work.’
James shrugged. He’d reddened his already-ginger beard by scrubbing it with tea, which had the effect of making him look unruly and a bit charmingly stupid; they’d had months in close quarters now but him with his brow furrowed and the smallest of pouts made Francis, God help him, want to crack a smile or stand up fast. ‘But you don’t like London very much.’
‘I like it fine!’
‘You hate dancing,’ James countered. Francis tied off a smart edge to the newly sanctified cassock and James helped him to his feet, putting a hand under his elbow as he groaned at the movement. ‘And that’s all that awaits us after this, old man, as well you know – a nice, tidy series of social occasions with eligible unmarried women and their conniving mothers. And very good food not at our expense. What a fate!’
‘So I should hide away in Ireland, should I.’ They were very close; Francis enjoyed the breath on his cheek and contemplated adjusting James’ absurd saint’s collar over his uniform shirt.
‘Well! I wouldn’t have it.’ He kissed him, brief enough that Francis swayed helplessly forward for more, but James Ross was captain again with limited time that was not Francis’ alone. With the Antarctic now at their back his briskness had returned, replacing the wolfish, strange focus that had seen them through from Christmas on, and the result between them was an odd combination of flirtation and a little awkward distance that acknowledged they would be onshore before they knew it. Francis wiped his mouth out of instinct as James drew himself up dramatically, spinning on his heel for inspection and casting about for the oversized mitre Mr Oates had made out of paper and glue.
‘Good?’
‘Grand. You’ll frighten all the snakes out of Ireland and then some.’
‘Oh, that’s for later,’ James chuckled, and the corner of his lip quirked up in a way Francis had missed all winter. ‘When I make you play some fair colleen.’
***
Two bells. He coughs so the whiskey clears the back of his throat. Overheard the quarterdeck grunts and booms with sounds never heard on the open ocean. One night, sat here like this, he thought he heard a whale making the trapped keel sing.
***
His own father had wished he’d been something like John Franklin. There was an Irishman with aspirations: George Crozier, always pronounced in reverent tones as though fresh from the Domesday Book. Francis had always hated the way he lilted their surname out of his own accent, like people who ground a sentence to a halt just to say Bonaparte the French way.
George Crozier needed no occasion to get drunk but always did so with a unique viciousness on St Patrick’s Day, as though to punish himself for not being English, English, effortless in his claim to the warm and the cold. Sir John was teetotal, insufferable and effortless in his own perfect blind self-control and the profound paternal judgement that kept his niece’s hand in marriage far removed. When they returned from Antarctica, Francis had grown increasingly mindful of seating himself on the same side of the table at social engagements; he did not want Sir John to see how quickly into a meal his own face turned red.
‘O’Connell,’ Sir John had said at a Royal Society dinner held in their honour shortly before they left, booming across the table in Parry’s direction, ‘is surely overdue a knock on the head.’ Francis himself was seven glasses in but felt sure this was the only time he’d heard Franklin propose violence directly, about politics or anything else; he blinked into his pudding.
‘No, sir – would that it had come ten years ago!’ cut in a small, nasal Cambridge man to Sir John’s left who Francis didn’t know. ‘But I daresay he is well and truly toothless now, O’Connell. We have only the Trinity firebrands to fear, spare us.’
The man across from him made an exaggerated sign of the Cross and the table descended into laughter. Francis felt heat rise beneath his collar and didn’t quite know why. Sir John glanced amiably down the table in his direction, and to Francis’ surprise the face was all his own father’s – pretending not to be pointed, hiding some kind of great anger himself.
‘Do you have any opinion of the young men of Trinity College, Francis?’ Sir John enquired, and a few men who were not of the Admiralty turned to look too. ‘Captain Crozier is to be my second, you know, gentlemen – and I believe you will not be the only Irishman on our expedition either, Francis!’
Further down the table, he felt rather than saw James Ross turn his face to his plate and found himself wondering and wishing he knew, despite himself, what that was for – if James was embarrassed by how these gentlemen got when they were drunk, or if the anticipation of what Francis might say was the problem.
‘I have no opinion,’ he said thickly, ‘if it’s insurrection you’re worried about, Sir John. I think you’ll find me rather tame. But I was only ever clever enough for the Navy, sir – you’ll sympathise, I’m sure.’
Gales of laughter at this, the dull hyena bellowing these people did to wind each other up. Sometimes he understood it fine but so soon after Antarctica he had no head or energy for the intricate politics of the laughter, which James had always translated for him like the gossip hound he’d been when they were younger. Now the only indication of danger he had was the subject of Ireland and the uneasy prickle on the back of his neck at Sir John’s unbroken gaze.
I will have you sober on this expedition, Francis, he said later, not unkindly, pressed close as they waited for their carriages in the freezing rain. It is of course not my decision to make, and I will say no more of it; but I would have you bring your best to the Passage, by God. I will not be made a fool of on my own ship or yours, and that is all I have to say.
His own father had never stopped when he said he would. Francis found the alternative impossible to imagine, and had gone home to his rooms to drink.
***
He thinks, how do I stop becoming. How do I really pause, be truly still in the dark – when even now they’re twirling in some unknown bit of water five or two years ago they would’ve named for Sir James Clark Ross. This late, Francis gets into a habit of parsing his thoughts as glimpses of a fall, blinked snatches of moving parts well beyond his control that he knows will eventually come to a full, abrupt halt. He anticipates the impact ringing in his ears.
Francis pours himself another with effort. The bottle is close to empty and committing to the rest feels an impossible obligation. Anxiety burns in his chest, makes him burp, narrows his eyes in his stiff seat. By this point, he thinks, if he were here, James would’ve fallen asleep.
There it is, briefly, history laid out in such a legible, sudden-vivid chronology it startles: in their last two shared years Francis’ drinking changed. He’d stayed up too late too often to keep himself warm in dark Antarctic daytimes; towards the end in Blackheath he and James would find themselves in the awkward, unfamiliar position of drinking one another under the table. He’d be left panting gently on the couch, tongue half-lolling like a burnt-out sled dog, and the bottle would be finished, and another. James withdrew slow and vaguely disapproving, though he always let the visits to Blackheath linger. Carry on, old man.
It feels as though he were falling face-first, tasting that first gut-leap of horror that comes with knowing you simply cannot put your hands out in time. Risk a broken wrist; there is nothing like getting your face smashed in, the exquisite pain and danger of a shattered nose. The memory of James’ voice speeds up the fall so viscerally that Francis slaps his hand on the table to brace and makes a small, gulped noise that lands pathetic on his ears.
When they went to Antarctica there was playful, half-serious talk among the men – understandable, Francis granted, as someone who’d never taken to science himself beyond the practicalities of the weather – of the dangers of falling off the earth. That Columbian, admirably archaic fantasy had never occurred to these new Terrors and Erebuses headed North. It was as though their bodies registered gravity as instinct rather than natural law and removed that the little edge of fear entirely. Maybe, Francis considers loosely, drawing a nail over a ragged bit of the little Navy table, this made them predisposed to place false trust in the Arctic – if you can’t fall off, how bad can it really be?
How do I stop becoming. He finishes the glass and for an instant can only feel the sickly, divine burn. How do I stop becoming. How do I cease to become.
Not cease to be. Not cease to be. Beyond Irishness; his father erased from his jaw. In the mountain range of the winter pack. Dug deep, moving on a current fathoms below that might connect continents. He’s never been to Russia; even as a younger man, his own modest Argonautican aspirations towards travel never took him so far as James Fitzjames. Let me stop. Let me go no further. Let me lie down on this ice and weep.
Oh, this is fucking pre-emptive and insufferable. His lower back is aching; he’s developed an infernal slump from the unnatural stillness of the deck and the lack of swell that improves a naval man’s posture. He can’t be bothered to sit up or go to bed. He has no reason not to sleep – Jopson will have left a glass of water by his berth and in the morning he will start again a little easier – except for the immediate and emergency contradictions of his own body, his inability to piss standing up in his current state, the mammoth expedition of rising and taking twelve or fifteen steps.
Was John Franklin, who died sober, ever moved to feel like this alone in his cabin – not drunk but closed-in, moving too fast within a hurtling vice? He wonders if James will remember him entire and not just like this when he’s gone; he wonders, helpless to his own falling-down, if the snakes left Ireland all at once. Perhaps they existed only to embellish Patrick’s miracle and keep the Catholics wondering. Perhaps a vengeful snake, not the vision of an angel, had killed him, and left him to die a quiet martyr in Down.